Moving off WordPress without losing rankings
The most common worry about moving a website is not the price or the work, it is losing search rankings. It is a fair worry — and a workable one. Three things decide it, and all three are in your hands before the domain points anywhere new.
By Webeas
“Will I lose my rankings?” is the first question we get when someone considers moving a site. The honest answer: nobody can promise you rankings, because the person building the site does not decide them. The search engine does. What can be influenced is whether it finds the same content in the same place after the move — and that comes down to three things.
1. Addresses stay, or they redirect
A search engine knows your site by its addresses. When /services/boiler-repair
becomes /services/boiler-repair-2 after the move, it lost a page it knew and
found a new one with no history.
The rule is simple: change addresses only when you have a reason stronger than convenience. An ugly address with a number on the end earns more by staying than by being tidied up. Where a change is unavoidable, the old address needs a permanent redirect (301) to the new one — and over a few weeks the search engine rewrites what it remembered about that page.
Do not forget images. They hold their own positions in image search, other sites link to them, and Google crawls them more slowly than pages. Where you can, leave their addresses alone.
2. All the content has to arrive
Moving ten pages out of twenty and “finishing the rest later” means ten pages return a 404 the day after the switch. A search engine will not drop them immediately, but a visitor will — and in that order it hurts more.
Before you switch the domain, go through a list of the old site’s pages and tick off what is already on the new one. What gets forgotten most: old articles, branch pages, form thank-you pages (emails link to them) and PDFs someone linked to somewhere.
3. Titles and descriptions move across, they are not rewritten
The page title and description are what the search engine shows in the result. Rewriting them during the move to match a new template also changes what you were visible for.
Move them as they are, and only once the site has settled improve them one at a time and watch what happens. A move and an optimisation are two jobs; done at once, you cannot tell which change did what.
An order that breaks nothing
- Build the new site on a temporary address and leave the old one running. Nothing switches, nobody notices.
- Go through the list of old addresses and check that each has a counterpart or a redirect on the new site.
- Check titles, descriptions and headings on the pages that matter most.
- Switch the domain. From now on the new site is live and the old one is a backup.
- Keep the old hosting alive for another month. Cancel it once you are sure.
- Watch the 404s. A list of addresses returning errors shows what was missed — and each one is a redirect waiting to be added.
What to expect even when you do everything right
A few weeks of wobble. The search engine has to crawl the site again, compare and decide; until it does, positions move up and down. That is not a sign the move failed, it is the normal course of it. Do not panic after one week; do ask questions after two months.
And one thing a move will not fix: a site nobody could find will not be found after moving either. A move preserves what was there. When there was nothing, you are starting from zero — and that is a different job.
How a migration works with us, including what we move and what we do not, is on the website migration page. The two routes are compared in What a small business website costs.
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